Amongst the wide variety of portable electronic devices available today, mobile phones have become particularly pervasive, with more than double the penetration of the Internet. These devices have rapidly advanced in capability and can do far more than Voice and SMS. Using these capabilities to deliver and execute applications that provide customisable interactivity to mobile phones and other devices is highly desirable but continues to be a challenging endeavour due the varied types of largely incompatible devices and platforms on the market.
Most interactive applications for mobile phones involve either Short Message Service (SMS) or the development of dedicated applications that address specific business requirements. SMS interactivity suffers from poor usability (the user has to be familiar with idiosyncratic commands) and security issues (SMS source addresses can be faked), thus limiting their usage to simple, non-sensitive transactions. Furthermore, an organisation wishing to use SMS to interact with its customers needs to come to some commercial arrangement with the telecommunications provider in order to establish billing procedures and so on. This can be inconvenient for the organisation, and may also be quite expensive, both to set up and also to operate on an on-going basis.
The dedicated applications are an attempt to address these shortcomings by developing programming code that is executed by the mobile device to perform a specific task. This involves significant amounts of time, at least because mobile phones from different manufacturers are not usually binary compatible and cannot execute the same executable applications. Additionally, these applications are limited to the functionality required at the time of development, and thus may not support additions or modifications to that functionality. As can be appreciated, distributing changes to these applications is similarly quite a tedious process, typically requiring the user to manually download and install an updated version of the application on their telephone.